What is the EA Fo­rum Prize?

The Prize is an in­cen­tive to cre­ate posts like this. But more im­por­tantly, we see it as an op­por­tu­nity to show­case ex­cel­lent con­tent as an ex­am­ple and in­spira­tion to the Fo­rum’s users.

An in­tro­duc­tion which serves as a use­ful guide to a long anal­y­sis.

Sum­maries of each sec­tion placed un­der the sec­tion head­ers, mak­ing nav­i­ga­tion and com­pre­hen­sion even eas­ier.

End­notes which help read­ers ver­ify in­for­ma­tion for them­selves.

The use of a clas­sic frame­work for im­pact anal­y­sis (scale, ne­glect­ed­ness, and tractabil­ity), which helps read­ers com­pare men­tal health to other cause ar­eas that have been eval­u­ated us­ing the same frame­work.

We hope to see more such in­ves­ti­ga­tions in the fu­ture for other promis­ing causes.

“Les­sons Learned from a Prospec­tive Alter­na­tive Meat Startup Team” is a well-or­ga­nized and highly in­for­ma­tive dis­cus­sion from a team that tried to start a high-im­pact com­pany. The au­thors provide use­ful ad­vice about en­trepreneur­ship and sum­ma­rize the state of al­ter­na­tive-meat re­search, a key topic within an­i­mal welfare. While they de­cided not to move for­ward with a startup, the team learned from the ex­pe­rience and also pro­duced value for the EA com­mu­nity by shar­ing their story on the Fo­rum.

We’ve been im­pressed by similar “post­mortem” ar­ti­cles pub­lished on the Fo­rum in the past. Go­ing for­ward, we hope to see other peo­ple share les­sons from the pro­jects they pur­sue, whether or not they “com­plete” those pro­jects.

The vot­ing process

All posts made in the month of De­cem­ber qual­ified for vot­ing, save for those writ­ten by CEA staff and Prize judges.

Vot­ers re­cused them­selves from vot­ing for con­tent writ­ten by their col­leagues. Other­wise, they used their own in­di­vi­d­ual crite­ria for choos­ing posts, though they broadly agree with the goals out­lined above.

Win­ners were cho­sen by an ini­tial round of ap­proval vot­ing, fol­lowed by a runoff vote to re­solve ties.

Next month

The Prize will con­tinue with a round for Jan­uary’s posts! After that, we’ll eval­u­ate whether we plan to keep run­ning it (or per­haps change it in some fash­ion). We hope that the Fo­rum’s many ex­cel­lent De­cem­ber posts will provide in­spira­tion for more great work in the com­ing months.

Feed­back on the Prize

We’d love to hear any feed­back you have about the Prize. Leave a com­ment or con­tact Aaron Gertler with ques­tions or sug­ges­tions.

Thanks very much! I think this prize is a great idea. I was definitely mo­ti­vated to in­vest more time and effort by the hope of win­ning the prize (along with the satis­fac­tion of get­ting front page with a lot of karma).

I want to re­mind that in Jan­uary some posts may not be brows­able by day any­more. This hap­pened to my post, but I don’t know if other peo­ple had this same prob­lem. You may want to keep this in mind in or­der not to miss po­ten­tial can­di­dates.

Thanks for not­ing this con­cern! We gather can­di­dates us­ing an ex­tract di­rectly from the Fo­rum’s database, which con­tains ev­ery post. (There have been is­sues with cer­tain posts not ap­pear­ing in cer­tain views, but we haven’t seen posts van­ish from the site com­pletely—I’ve checked each post re­ported this way and have been able to find it with a quick Google search.)